Lorenzo de' Medici

Lorenzo de' Medici (1449 to 1492), known in his own time as Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the de facto ruler of the Republic of Florence during the height of the Italian Renaissance and one of the era's most significant patrons of the arts. Head of the Medici banking family and its political network, he used the family's wealth to commission and support painters, sculptors, and scholars in Florence, including artists associated with the workshop tradition that trained Michelangelo, and to build a personal collection of classical manuscripts and antiquities. His patronage helped make fifteenth century Florence the leading center of the early Renaissance's revival of classical learning and naturalistic art, though historians debate how much of the city's artistic flowering should be credited to Lorenzo personally rather than to the wider culture of Florentine civic and mercantile patronage he inherited and extended.